The Diminutive Fallacy

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 146):

As we have seen above, another regular resource for spirit involves naming. When Kristy tries to explain to her mother that she doesn’t want to go out, she used the Vocative mummy – which, when contrasted with mum or the markedly formal mother – makes clear that although she is rejecting her mother’s attempts at getting her to leave the house, she is saying these rejections with love (Poynton 1990).

(67) Kristy Mummy… I don’t want to go away from you.

As Poynton notes, naming in this regard offers a highly nuanced set of gradations of warming and warning. Crudely speaking, this means we can order names of people in terms of the degree to which they show warmth – from full names to shortened personal names to nicknames to nicknames with iterated suffixes. To return to Chapter 1 and take the names of the first author that his mother uses for him as an example, we can arrange the names from least warmth to most: Yaegan John Doran, Yaegan John, Yaegan, Yaeg, Yaegy, Yaegy-J, Yaegy-JJ, Yaegy-JJJ, Yaegy-JJJJJ.

ChatGPT Comments:

This passage exposes most clearly the slippage that sustains “spirit” as a pseudo-system: the conflation of cultural folk models of warmth with semiotic organisation. The authors propose that naming “offers a highly nuanced set of gradations of warming and warning,” citing Poynton (1990) — but what they take from Poynton is not a systemic account of tenor, but a commonsense psychology of affection reinterpreted through a Hallidayan idiom.

1. The regression to folk affect

The notion that “Yaegan John Doran” is “less warm” than “Yaegy-JJJJJ” is not an observation about semiotic potential, but a retrospective reading of interpersonal intimacy within a particular sociocultural setting (Anglo middle-class family discourse). It mistakes a local affective convention for a universal semiotic gradient, presenting social familiarity as if it were a parametric axis of meaning. In doing so, it transforms registerial variation into mood ornamentation — a drift from systemic potential to the micropsychology of personal tone.

2. From tenor to temperament

Crucially, the authors again misplace the system. Naming belongs to the lexicogrammar as a realisation of tenor (context), not as a manifestation of a separate “system of spirit.” Tenor variables (status, contact, affect) are realised through the lexicogrammatical resources available — including vocatives — which means there is no additional stratum in which these are recombined as “spirit.” To treat “Mummy” or “Yaegy-JJJJJ” as evidence of a separate semiotic system of warmth is to reify affective interpretation as if it were systemic structure.

3. The iterative joke and the semiotic cut

The “Yaegy-JJJJJ” example, intended humorously, inadvertently demonstrates the absurdity of this model. The playful iteration of suffixes is not a continuous scaling of warmth; it is a metapragmatic parody of intimacy — a reflexive construal of how naming indexes closeness. That is, the example itself makes visible the distinction between sign and meta-sign, between interpersonal meaning and its commentary. Yet the authors conflate these layers, treating the parody as a natural extension of affective warmth.

4. The anthropological blind spot

Underlying this whole reasoning is an unexamined anthropological assumption: that “warmth” is a universally legible social-affective dimension. This presupposes a monosemic affective space, erasing the cultural and interpersonal specificity of naming practices. In many languages, morphological elaboration or diminutives do not correspond to affective warmth at all, but to irony, mitigation, or even insult. The model thus projects a local cultural intuition as if it were a general systemic law.

5. Semiotic misplacement: spirit as epiphenomenon

Naming patterns are not carriers of spirit; they are one among many resources through which tenor is construed. The warmth or warning that Doran, Martin, and Zappavigna attribute to these vocatives does not pre-exist as a distinct stratum — it is an interpretative effect arising from tenor relations. “Spirit” therefore functions not as a theoretical system but as a label for folk affective interpretation, positioned above the lexicogrammar but below context, without any systemic justification for its existence.